on Apr 15th, 2009Equinox Update Interview
EclipseCon was a blast this year. Lots of great talks and fun people to talk to. One of my favorite folks to chat with is Michael Cote from RedMonk. He’s got lots of great ideas and feedback on things. He’s also very interested in Equinox and this whole runtime thing at Eclipse. EclipseCon afforded us an opportunity to sit (well, stand) together and chat. Cote just released the video interview on RedMonk TV.
Check it out and see what you think. Stay tuned as I believe there is a demo session coming up as well.
Great interview — I hope your vision of “choose what you want” will become true soon. Whenever it comes to installation eclipse plugins I get a high level of frustration. In the last years, I have lost hundreds of (frustrating) hours with installation (just 1h/week sums up to 400h in 8 years, and I am sure it is *much more*) . I hope at some point in time eclipse delivers what it promises: easy installations….
What’s the frustration?
- finding the update sites is the current problem no 1 (it is like hand resolving dependencies)
- having different eclipse share the same plugins is not really supported from the UI
- if something goes wrong with the installation, there is no way to figure out what’s wrong (Just a few hours ago I tried to install egit and something went wrong — the about dialog showed that the feature is installed. -clean did not help. -console and “diag ” showed nothing. The old update manager showed me a nice error marker on the feature but no way to figure out what the error is)
OSGi/p2 in eclipse is like a 1000 horse power engine in a 1930ies Volkswagen beatle — great technology but too powerful so it can destroy its “host”.
What is missing? The end user story/perspective/mental model. It is too complicated/powerful to be mastered by normal users. The attempts to create a simple UI on top are doomed to fail, because they try to ‘fake’ a something that is not there and when something goes wrong, the errors do not fit into the “simplified model”. For example: features are technology driven but the user wants to get “products” not countless fine granular features with cryptic names and strange dependencies.
I hope for the epp wizard– but every time I try it, I don’t get past the first page — with cryptic errors like: “Cannot find solution following requirements Match[requiredCapability:”
Am I bitter? Yes somehow — 8 years of eclipse and the promise of an extensible platform seems further away today than 8 years ago (when we had an installation perspective). P2 is the eclipse version of the “windows installation/shared dll/registry nightmare” — I am so happy that lot’s of programs on windows are now available as “Portable Software” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_application)…. I am waiting waiting for “Portable Eclipse Plugins”…
Michael